The Education Designathon, the 1st Hands-On Hackathon for Education

This was the first prototype for my Dual Masters Thesis at MIT.
This overnight hackathon proved that there was, indeed, a space for big, collaborative community thinking to occur in the Education space.
The Education Designathon brought together education thinkers from the MIT, Harvard, Brown, and Olin community and demonstrated project ideation, development, and implementation in under 39 hours. Sixteen projects were born out of the three topic categories: Hands-On Learning, Digital Learning, and Systems Re-Thinking. There were four key design parameters of the event—

ii) Education Experts were brought in to pitch Challenge Presentations, lead workshops, and serve as ad hoc mentors,

iii) A laboratory equipped with prototyping materials and a spending budget for each student enabled physical project developments, and

iv) Award categories were not matched to the three topic categories but to sponsoring EdExperts.

The results of the Education Designathon previews the plethora of solutions born by simply introducing education as a transparent and “hackable” challenge. The lessons learned here served so that a year later, The Education DesignShop was born with added structure and team support.

Skills

Links

Charles Fadel, founder of the Center for Curruculum Redesign, pitches and Education Challenge to inspire the hackers

Ed Moriarty from the MIT Edgerton Center leads a Workshop on hands-on learning

Teams begin to form after identifying similar interests with their 60-second Idea Pitches

Teams take it to the whiteboards and begin to scope out their hack plan for the next 48 hours

A hacker works on a car for remote lab experiments online

A hacker learns about circuits in order to make a circuit-learning kit for children

An Olin College team wonders...what now? Their Dynamic Table aims to give students with ADHD a reason to stand up and walk around the table by linking the computer's scrolling feature to the revolutions of the table

Ed Burnell of MIT presents his team's final prototype: The Little Book of Circuits, a children’s book that teaches through interactive circuit elements embedded in the pages